by Mark Slouka
I would study their faces: the flat green planes of their cheeks, the slight indentations that were their eyes. I wasn’t sure, early on, whether the men in the crypt had lived or died, so sometimes I’d let them live, flying up to the top of my desk like armed angels. Other times they’d be killed, and I’d knock them down with my finger. I continued to do this—killing them one time, saving them the next—even after I knew what had happened to them.
Like all children, there were many things I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why it was that the roses of Karlovy Vary, when dipped into a bucket of mineral water at the cost of ten crowns a stem, would grow streaked with gray and green deposits and harden to stone. I didn’t understand the story I’d overheard of twenty-year-old Robert Nezval, the poet’s son, whose mother had walked into the family parlor one winter afternoon to find him playing the piano with both his wrists slashed.
But some things I knew. I knew there had been a war. That all the people we knew had gone through it in one way or another. That Czechoslovakia, the country my parents came from, had been taken over. That some had fought back, and others hadn’t.
I knew other things. I knew that once upon a time there had been someone for whom my mother had cared very much. Who had gone out hunting in the rain one morning and never returned. Who had lost his way in the forest. Or leaned too far over the water. I knew this the way children know things, and knowing it didn’t trouble me. It had to be that way so that things could be the way they were now. So that in the early mornings my father could draw me whales with his fountain pen instead of working on his dissertation—three quick strokes made a spout; a single touch of ink, a backward-glancing eye.
In the winters, when we were still living in the old apartment above 63rd Road, my mother would braid vánočka for Christmas Eve. She tried to teach me, but I was a hopeless case: my hands seemed to have been made for the express purpose of tearing dough or turning it into glue. Year after year I would stand beside her and watch her roll out four perfect ropes of yellow dough, press their ends together with the heel of her floured hand, then twine the separate plaits into a pattern of triangles, all the while dipping her fingers into a hill of flour spilled on a piece of curling wax paper. I understood nothing. She worked quickly, almost carelessly, with the kind of rough familiarity I had seen in expert gardeners, centering the flour into a flat-planed hill with her palms, wrecking it, building it up again. And suddenly it was done and she was painting the finished braid with egg yolks, making it shine.
I still remember those winter afternoons, with the perfume of the dying pine drifting in from the next room and the early dark coming on outside. The decorated balconies on the buildings opposite ours looked like small, multicolored candies. We laughed at the baggy constrictors of dough I produced and the great doughy highways I wove out of them, and one year she stuck big gecko pads to the ends of her fingers and chased me around the living room. I can still hear her laughter now and then, as if it had been trapped somewhere, and when I do, I’m once more in that kitchen with her, high above the world and separate.
After we were finished, I would watch her wiping the table down with short, sharp strokes, rinsing out the rag in the sink, pushing back her hair with her forearm. She would usually begin cleaning the sink immediately, sweeping around the edges with her hand, and I’d watch her scrub at the sides with blue cleanser, turning tight little whorls, miniature hurricanes. And suddenly—this is how it always was—something would change, and it would be as if there were someone else in the room with us.
“It doesn’t matter,” I heard her say once as she was rinsing her hands. “None of it matters.”
She turned off the water. For a few moments she leaned both hands on the sink, deciding, I thought, what to do next.
“Daddy should be home soon,” I said.
She was still thinking.
“Can I go play in my room?” I said.
My mother began wiping her hands on a dishrag decorated with pine trees and ornaments.
“Why don’t you go play for a while,” she said. “Daddy will be home soon.”
And there he would be. Placing his black hat carefully on the peg. Giving his heavy coat a shake before hanging it on the rack. My mother would come out of the kitchen holding a wooden spoon or an open cookbook and give him a quick kiss and then I’d be in his arms and he’d carry me down the hall and into our narrow living room, and after dinner he’d pull a chair to the side of my bed and read to me. The yellow shade of the pirate lamp made a small circle. My father would sit at the edge of it, holding the book in his left hand as though giving a sermon, always touching two fingers to his tongue before turning the page.
Once upon a time, he would read, there was a small village, and in that village lived a humble farmer and his wife. And to this couple one happy day there was born a son. They named him Otesánek. What does Otesánek mean? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a name. The farmer and his wife were very happy. Otesánek was a fat, healthy baby with small black eyes. See? Here’s Otesánek in his mother’s arms, and there’s the father, and there’s the horse, looking on from the stable. Is that their dog? I should think so. All the neighbors came by to congratulate them. Look at those arms, said the tailor. Look at those legs, said the cobbler’s wife. What a healthy baby, they all said. Just look how he eats!
Otesánek ate and ate. He ate like no other baby had ever eaten before—not like you, arguing with your kašička every morning—and he grew like no other baby had ever grown before. The cow couldn’t give enough milk. The chickens couldn’t lay enough eggs. Here he is, sitting on the floor. Look at all those pitchers of milk, all those loaves of bread. Is that his father? It sure is. Look how small he is. He doesn’t look very happy. Otesánek’s mother and father ran all around the village buying food. Otesánek’s father carved him an extra-large spoon to eat with. But it wasn’t enough. Otesánek would eat whatever they put in front of him and scream for more.
Otesánek grew and grew. Soon he was bigger than his father. Soon he was bigger than a cow. He grew so big that he couldn’t fit into his parents’ little house anymore. He had to sit outside in the yard. One day a chicken wandered by, pecking at the dirt. Quick as a flash, Otesánek grabbed it and stuffed it in his mouth. The family goat came next, and the pigs, and the dog with the pink tongue. Otesánek ate the sheep in their hot, woolly coats. He ate the white geese that walked by the pond, and the carp that lived under the lily pads. What are those, Daddy? Those? Those are the hooves of the cow.
Soon he was bigger than a house. When he ate the plow horse, his mother and father came out to plead with him. Otesánek, please, they said, we will have nothing if you keep this up. When will you stop? Quick as lightning, Otesánek grabbed his mother and father in each of his huge, pudgy hands. When there is nothing more to eat, he croaked, and he stuffed them head-first into his mouth.
Otesánek ate the whole town: the cobbler and the cobbler’s wife, the tailor and the carpenter, the shopkeeper and the teacher and all the little children. One by one. And he might have gone on eating forever except for a little girl whom he had swallowed as she sat at her sewing holding a pair of rusty scissors. Down she went, down into the hot red room of his stomach. When she realized where she was, she took the scissors and cut a hole in Otesánek’s belly. Out she came. Out came the cobbler and the cobbler’s wife, the tailor and the carpenter, the shopkeeper and the teacher and all the little children. Out stepped the plow horse and the goat, the chickens and the geese. Out jumped the dog with the pink tongue. And out came Otesánek’s mother and father. They were happy to be alive. They danced and sang and carried the little girl around on their shoulders. And they all lived happily ever after.
I can still see him, the crease of the page cutting him vertically above the elbow and the knee. Dimpled knees arched across the road, he has just snatched his father and crammed him head-first into his mouth. He has a single tooth, as big as a dictionary. Black holes for ey
es. To plead for mercy is absurd. There is no mercy here. He is the force that consumes, and he will keep on until the world—the narrow roads, the great square fields, the church itself, whose steeple pokes up like a child’s toy just above his thigh—is empty of man and beast. A grave under the sun. And only he is left.
They’re dying in the red room. All of them. Gesturing like bad Shakespearean actors, like swimmers fifty fathoms deep. The children turn slowly, uncomprehending, their schoolbooks paging in the hot tide.
A quick flash of inner pain, like gas, passes over the monster’s face. Something sparks on the white wall of his skin, like a diamond birthing itself from his heart. You can see it, there!—a tiny blade, spotted and fine. Now he is clawing at his stomach, thrusting his own fist down his throat, as though devouring himself. He is in agony. There is nothing he can do about it. He is as big as the sun, and he can’t stop it. To get at what’s killing him, he’ll have to tear himself open. Either way, he’ll die from within.
There she is, stepping through the thick door of his flesh into the morning air. The monster lies slumped against a hill, still in his diaper. She is holding the scissors by her side. She has long black hair and a sad mouth, and of all the people dancing in the square, she is the only one who isn’t smiling.
4
MY MOTHER HAD BEEN BORN IN 1920 IN RAČÍN, A VILLAGE in the Vysočina highlands of Moravia. When I was a child she would tell me Račín looked very much like the pictures of Czech villages in my book České pohádky, and I would sit on my bed and look at them and imagine her there, hiding in the black shadow of an open door, or below the undercut bank of a stream. It seemed to me that if I looked closely enough, deeply enough, I’d make out her outline, a deeper dark within the shadow’s wedge, or recognize that bit of light between the blades of grass as the topmost curl of her hair.
When I visited Racin in 1979, I discovered that it was, in fact, just like the pictures in my book. A cluster of slate roofs. A tangle of close, muddy gardens and tilting fences. The requisite small, swift stream, thick with nettle, cutting under the road. An odd feeling. It was as though I had found myself inside my own storybook. No one seemed to be about that hot July afternoon—even the butterflies along the roadside seemed drugged, their wings opened wide across the blooms—and I wandered down a dirt road past a stagnant pond to the shade of a forest dotted with mossed stumps and thick tufts of grass, and all the time I had the strange but not unpleasant feeling of being watched.
At some point I remember sitting down on a pile of fresh-cut pines that someone had left by the wayside. The white circles where their branches had been lopped off made them look spotted. They were bleeding dark trails of sap from every cut—the air was rich with it. Large brown-and-purple butterflies I recalled from one of my childhood books moved in and out of the trees along the edge of the field; a small group fanned at the graying edge of a puddle a horse had left in the road. In my book, I remembered, the cardboard cutouts of the butterflies had slid in and out of invisible slots in the stems of flowers, opening and closing their wings as I opened and closed the book.
Back in the village I found the house—fourth down from the pond—without too much trouble. I had an old photograph, taken before the war. It hadn’t changed. I looked at it for a while, with its slate roof and stuccoed walls. At the end of a goat-eaten yard was an old barn, half stone, half brick. A sheep with bits of leaves and sawdust in its wool was lying in its shade. No one seemed to be at home, and after a minute or two, when the sheep hadn’t moved and the strangely familiar face of a six- or eight-year-old girl had not appeared in the double windows to stare at me—as I had half believed and feared it might—I went on my way. If there had been someone to warn, someone to tell of the things to come, I might have stayed.
She had been the third child born, and the first to survive. There had been a brother who came after her, she told me, though he had lived only a few hours, like a moth, and had been buried in a down-filled box hardly larger than a loaf of bread. My mother remembered that morning—the morning they buried her little brother—as one of the most precious moments of her childhood. She couldn’t tell me why. Sometimes there are things you love and can’t explain, she said.
A cold morning. A fresh wind roughed the grass along the road; the flowers shook their heads and nodded. Her father, she said, held her hand as they walked, his calloused palm as hard and warm as a piece of wood left in the sun. On the way, she remembered, he told her a wonderful story about a trpaslík—an elf—who knew the path to a stone door, no taller than a hammer, that led to the other world. The one below the pond. From there, her father told her, you could look up and see this life, see everything—the trees, the separating clouds, the fishermen pulling at their earlobes or folding up their wooden stools—all this, just slightly distorted, like a face behind poorly made glass or a pane of new ice. These glimpses of our world were very precious to those who lived below; they could gaze at a dog’s pink tongue lapping at the edge of the sky for hours, and on those rare afternoons when the children leaped from the clouds, spearing down toward the silted roofs of their world clothed in white sheaths of bubbles, they would gather in great swaying crowds, their clothes fluttering about them, and weep.
I begged her to tell me what happened after that, how the story ended, but she had forgotten. It didn’t matter. There were some things my mother wouldn’t tell me—I was used to that. But the story bothered me. I wondered what the pond people did in the winter when the sky above their heads stiffened and their world went dark; how they could see or play, and whether they had great watery fires to keep them warm.
And so, for some time after my mother told me her father’s half-story, whenever I found myself alone with one of my parents’ friends, I would ask them—Mrs. Jakubcová, for example. Mrs. Jakubcová had never had any children of her own. She had calves as big and smooth as bowling pins, and she always sat on the sofa with her legs to one side as if glued at the knees, and smelled sweet and sad, like a dusty pastry. One day I asked her about the people who lived under the pond, and while I was at it, why the young man had played the piano instead of calling for a doctor, and who the men in the crypt had been. And she tented a napkin over her finger and touched it to the corners of her lips two or three times—a few yellow crumbs and a chalk line of powdered sugar had stuck to her rose-colored lipstick—and told me that as far as she knew the people who lived in the pond slept a kind of half-sleep, like bears, waking fully only when the ice had cracked apart and light came into their world again, and that she didn’t know but that perhaps the young man had cared for his music more than he did for himself, and that the men in the crypt had been heroes. Czech patriots. Those had been hard times, she said.
Some weeks later I tried Mr. Hanuš, who walked with two canes because he had lost all his toes in a town I thought was named Mousehausen, but when I asked him one evening after he’d hobbled into my room to say good night to me (for he insisted on this), he didn’t seem to know anything about the pond people sleeping through the long winters. Sitting on the edge of my bed—I couldn’t have been more than six—he told me that the winters were the times of storytelling, when they imagined what they could not see and entertained themselves with long, complicated tales in which all the things they had glimpsed the year before played a role. I asked him about the young man who played the piano. Robert Nezval hadn’t wanted to live anymore, he said. Picking a big, gray picture book off the floor (it was a book of Greek myths; I have it still), he began to page through it absent-mindedly, past the picture of the herd of cows that Hermes stole from Apollo, with their bright yellow horns and blushing udders, past Athena being born from the head of Zeus, and Persephone being dragged into the earth by Hades. I wanted to show him the small wooden brooms that Hermes had tied to the cows’ tails to erase their tracks, and the four sleeping pigs, pink as newborn mice, falling into the dark with Persephone, but he was moving too quickly. Sometimes people just didn’t want to live anym
ore, he said. It happened.
As for the men in the crypt, he said, it had been a bad time and they had done a brave thing, as true and just a thing as one could imagine, and thousands had died because of it. That happened too.
“What did they do?” I asked him.
“They killed a man named Reinhard Heydrich.”
“How?”
“How?”
“How did they kill him?”
Mr. Hanuš sighed. “They tried to shoot him but the gun didn’t work, so they threw a bomb which wounded him and later he died. This all happened long before you were born, in 1942.”
“Did he wear a black helmet?”
“Heydrich? No. A kind of cap. Some of his soldiers did, though.”
“Why did they kill him?”
“He was a cruel man. He deserved to die.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because he killed a great many people who did not deserve it, and sent many more to places that were very bad.”
“Like prison?”
“Worse.”
“Did you...?”
“So who is this?” he asked me, pointing to a picture of Selene gazing down from the moon at sleeping Endymion, who lay, vaguely smiling, surrounded by strangely wild-looking sheep. He looked at me over the tops of his half-glasses. “I get to ask some questions too, you know,” he said.